We often get people asking us about blog writing and the benefits that it can have for a business. One of the questions that we are most commonly asked is how blogs actually impact SEO. While it is common knowledge that blogs are one of the best ways to boost a websites search engine ranking, it is not often clear how. In order to clarify this, we thought it would be helpful to have a post detailing the relationship between blogs and search engines and to better explain the benefits of SEO blog writing.
What Blogs Do For Your Business
Since Google is by far the most dominant search engine, most search engine optimization techniques that you may read or hear about relate to it, even if they don’t specifically say so. That being said, much of what relates to optimizing for Google applies to other search engines like Bing and Yahoo as well, so they should still be applied to your blog. What any of these search engines strive to do is to find the best, most relevant and most informative content for the web searcher. They look to eliminate any content that isn’t seen as being of value to the searcher. What blogs essentially do is offer something of value to those who are searching the web. The more value that is provided, the better the ranking.
Every blog article you post becomes a new portal into your site. When someone does a search using keywords that you have put in one of your blog articles, that article itself will pop up in search results. This means the more blogs you have, the more posts will pop up in related search results.
The other major thing that a blog does is increase your main page’s ranking overall. Since your blog is creating more value to your site, your site is seen as more valuable to Google and therefore given a greater priority.
Blogs also encourage backlinks to your site. The great thing about blogs is that the content is meant to be shared and when others either re-blog one of your posts or create a link to it, then they essentially create another pathway to your website for you.
How Blogs Do It
There are a number of ways that SEO blog writing actually impacts your ranking, but we will focus on the main factors that Google looks at:
Originality – This year Google released their Panda update and one of the things that it focuses on is originality when it comes to content. Websites with a steady stream of original content are given a higher value, since they are honestly striving to educate the reader, not just post re-hashed content for the sake of it.
Frequently Posted Content – Keeping originality in mind, it is important to be constantly posting regular content. Google looks for the “newness” factor of keywords and heavily favors the latest content that contains the relevant keywords. If 35% of your related keywords are updated regularly, then your blog and therefore your site will see a dramatic increase in ranking.
Optimized Content – While Google can’t actually read a blog post and tell that the writing is on par with Hemingway or Dickens, it does look at a number of things to determine quality. Length is certainly a factor, with any blog that is smaller than 300 words typically being downgraded. Keywords frequency is also a factor. They should be used regularly but not too much or Google will think that you are stuffing the blog to gain ranking and therefore lower it.
Should you need any more clarification on SEO blog writing or are interested in starting a blog for your business, then please contact us here at SevenAtoms. You can reach us through our contact page or by calling (925) 566-6969.
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